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Marx Can Wait
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The friend and collaborator of Marco Bellocchio, radical psychoanalyst Massimo Fagioli (1931-2017), once remarked that the director’s artistic greatness arises from the fact that he is a “great depressive” who risks the “destruction of his individual identity”. Every fan of Bellocchio’s cinema recognises its underlying – and sometimes more explicit – autobiographical element, especially in relation to his close-knit family. In Marx Can Wait, he exposes a particular, crucial trauma: the suicide at 29 of his depressed twin brother, Camillo. It happened in 1968, when Marco’s revolutionary fervour somewhat blinded him to Camillo’s deep-seated problems. Then, at least, Marx – and the looming class struggle – could not wait. But what to make, in retrospect, of these choices and priorities? The incident has haunted the director for his entire life, surfacing (like everything else in his experience) in displaced ways in his cinema. And, as always for this auteur, personal traumas are never purely personal: a reckoning with the radicalised years of the 1960s and ‘70s in Italy remains the perennial theme of his entire œuvre, as his subsequent, brilliant TV series Esterno notte (2022) once again demonstrates. Speaking of what may or may not be his final film, Kidnapped (2023), Bellocchio has commented wisely on the various forms of ideological fanaticism – political, spiritual or intellectual, there doesn’t ultimately seem to be much difference – that have gripped him during particular periods of his life. You could say, in a twisted way, that maybe I was, for certain periods… I wouldn’t say a fanatic, but a person of faith … (my brother) Piergiorgio said once – referring both to my brief militancy in the communist union, Maoism, and afterwards referring to my research, which was complex and cannot be mentioned in a few words, about the collective analysis of Massimo Fagioli – that it was a form of radicality in which life and thought, life and art, tended to be together to seek a unity … I then progressively separated myself from it. Although I don’t disown it, I chose my own freedom … My experience, for many years, gravitated around radical choices. In Marx Can Wait, the remaining members of the Bellocchio family gather to piece together – sometimes in conflicting accounts – the troubling incident of Camillo’s suicide. Other friends and specialists are also called upon to comment. Several participants died either before the completion of the editing, or since, including the perceptive critic-priest Virgilio Fantuzzi – see The Hidden God book review – and Marco’s impressive writer-editor brother Piergiorgio, who passed away at age 91 in April 2022. Punctuated with vivid and telling clips from Bellocchio’s fiction features (Fists in the Pocket [1965], Leap into the Void [1980], My Mother’s Smile [2002]), the investigation intermingles lucidity with longstanding feelings of guilt and regret. It is a beautiful, penetrating documentary. I heartily recommend the only in-depth discussion of the film I have so far found: Darragh O’Donoghue’s review in Cineaste (June 2023). As he provocatively suggests, especially in relation to The Eyes, the Mouth (1982): “Bellocchio’s films are autobiographical, but it turns out that it was Camillo who was their buried protagonist, not Marco”. O’Donoghue singles out the scenes in Marx Can Wait featuring the director’s “merciless children”. And indeed the film is especially memorable for the disapproving looks with which these adults, Elena and Pier Giorgio, greet their father’s self-justifications and evasions. Bellocchio, in the editing room, doesn’t spare himself these silent (and sometimes not so silent) reproaches. It’s a mark of his intensely self-scrutinising honesty – and his enduring greatness – as a filmmaker. MORE Bellocchio: Good Morning, Night, Blood of My Blood, The Traitor © Adrian Martin September 2021/May 2023 |
